I need more Apigee Edge environments for my development lifecycle but have run out... now what?

[davissean]

This article may help for the following:

• I am in a Free organization and have more Development Lifecycle stages than just test and prod.
• I have a Public Cloud organization and need more environments provisioned, but have license restrictions.
• I have Private Cloud organization and have restrictions on when the Operations team can create the environments.
• I am using any type of organization and only need more environments for a single project without affecting other development teams in my organization.

Typical API lifecycle

As discussed here, it is likely that you have many stages to your API lifecycle. These are probably managed through Continuous Integration.

Lets say that the stages of your lifecycle look like this:

Stage	Purpose
Development	Where the coding happens, probably against mocks
Integration	Integration against test backend systems
User Acceptance Testing	Functional testing by Product Owners and business folks
Non-functional Testing	Performance and penetration testing
Pre-production	Production-like environment for Certificate, Virtual Host, Cache and KVM checks
Sandbox	API consumers build against production-like APIs in an isolated environment
Production	Go live!

It would be nice if our Apigee environments can mimic this.

Initial solutions

• (Cloud) Get somebody to buy more environments
• (Private Cloud) Provision more environments

Bad solutions

• Sacrificing stages of your development lifecycle

Alternative solution: Pseudo-environments!

The Apigee Edge platform identifies which API to hit using the combination of Virtual Host and Base Path. Since a Virtual Host is associated with an environment, this is how we typically manage each stage of the lifecycle.

For example:

API Proxy	Environment	Virtual Host Alias	Base Path
proxy-v1	test	myapi-test-apigee.net	/v1/something
proxy-v1	prod	myapi-prod-apigee.net	/v1/something

However, if we want to have multiple Pseudo-environments in an Apigee environment, we can use different Base Paths.

Here is how we can deploy the 7 stages of our API Development Lifecycle into two environments:

Stage	API Proxy	Environment	Virtual Host Alias	Base Path
Dev	proxy-v1-dev	test	myapi-test-apigee.net	/v1-dev/something
Integration	proxy-v1-intg	test	myapi-test-apigee.net	/v1-intg/something
User Acceptance Testing	proxy-v1	test	myapi-test-apigee.net	/v1/something
Non-Functional Testing	proxy-v1-perf	test	myapi-test-apigee.net	/v1-perf/something
Pre-production	proxy-v1-preprod	prod	myapi-prod-apigee.net	/v1-pre/something
Sandbox	proxy-v1-sandbox	prod	myapi-prod-apigee.net	/v1-sandbox/something
Production	proxy-v1	prod	myapi-prod-apigee.net	/v1/something

Build Tools

We can of course use build tools and continuous integration to automate the promotion through each stage. For instances, using the Apigee Maven Deploy plugin, you can create a different Profile for each stage. There is an example of this here.

This allows you to pass the profile in to the deploy command, such as:

mvn install -Psandbox

Please comment to let me know what you think - especially if you have a better name than 'Pseudo-environments'!!